A Personal History of 3D Graphics

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It’s now 2006.

Most of what you read here is from personal memory, not news sources, so some of the dates may not be completely accurate. Also, I jump around a bit, because the chronological order doesn’t necessarily make for the best narrative.

Ten years ago, I was living in Corvallis, Oregon. Back then, I was a freelance writer, mostly writing reviews and technology features for Computer Gaming World. That year, two different Bay Area companies trekked up to Central Oregon to pay me a visit. One was Rendition, the other Nvidia. Nvidia showed off the NV1, a “multimedia accelerator” that had hardware support for 3D graphics, audio, and video. Rendition had samples of its Vérité V1000, which was a combination 2D/3D graphics chip.

Meanwhile, 3dfx (3Dfx back then) had started shipping the original Voodoo card towards the end of 1995. The Voodoo card was 3D only, so required a separate 2D card to run Windows and non-gaming applications. 3dfx generated considerable mindshare because of its effective developer relations activities. Danny Sanchez, then of Orchid, dragged me into the 3Dfx developer’s seminar at the 1995 Computer Game Developer’s Conference. At that same conference, Mike Weksler and I crashed the Rendition suite. At that point, 3Dfx had working silicon; Rendition only had emulation loops running. It was an era of accelerated rasterization with triangle setup, bilinear filtering, and minimal MIP-mapping thrown in.

Most of the hardware in development had started gestating before Microsoft bought a UK company known as Reality Lab. Reality Lab’s 3D API became Direct3D 1.0. At the 1996 GDC, ATI handed out versions of the original Rage3D graphics card, with a whopping 2MB of memory on board. We also saw S3 jump into the fray with its Virge 3D chip. Both the Virge and Rage3D were often referred to derisively as “3D decelerators”, because running in 3D mode was sometimes slower than using software rendering—though the image quality was better. Continued…

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